Lebanon’s mountains were named white in Phoenician
The Lebanese Republic occupies a Levantine crossroads between the Mediterranean and Arabian worlds, bordered by Syria and Israel. Phoenician lbn meant white, for the snow on Mount Lebanon, and Egyptian scribes wrote rmnn for the same pale ridge that still rises behind Beirut today.
The name appears nearly 70 times in the Hebrew Bible, but as an administrative unit it dates only to the Ottoman reforms of 1861 that created the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a label carried on into Greater Lebanon under the French mandate. The Natufians became sedentary around 12,000 BC, and Byblos, with huts, limestone floors, and burial jars older than 5000 BC, ranks among the oldest continuously inhabited cities.
As part of northern Canaan, the coast became home to the Phoenicians, seafarers based at Byblos, Sidon, and Tyre whose ninth-century BC colonies included Carthage and Cádiz. Assyria and then Babylon extracted tribute, and in 64 BC Pompey annexed Syria to Rome, placing this land in the province of Phoenice. It became an early Christian centre, and around the turn of the fifth century the hermit Maron began the ascetic tradition that gave the Maronites their name.
Muslim armies took the region from Byzantium in the seventh century, with Mu’awiya governing from Damascus. Mediterranean trade then slumped for three centuries, leaving Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, and Tripoli small. The Druze faith emerged from Shia Islam in the eleventh century and spread in southern Mount Lebanon, while Maronites grew in the north; the Crusades created lasting ties between the Franks and the Maronites, who pledged loyalty to the pope.
The Ottomans took Lebanon in 1516 and ruled through local emirs. The Druze leader Fakhr al-Din II, emir from 1590, expanded his power so far that Murad IV sent an army in 1633; he was executed in April 1635. After the empire’s collapse France created Greater Lebanon, independence came by 1943, and today the country ranks about 102nd on the Human Development Index.
Source: Lebanon
